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'Not I' review or 'Screeching and scrabbling about in the dark.'

'Not
I', Samuel Beckett

Royal
Court Theatre, 22nd
May 2013

'Not
I', as with so many of Beckett's works, renders the critic
meaningless. Try to pry this piece open and decipher its meaning and
it will fall apart in your hands. Ostensibly, 'Not I' is about a
seventy (ish) yr old lady who is now relating – very quickly and
very erratically - salient moments from her lonely life. The only
snag is, we can't see this lady. All we can see is her mouth, spotlit
and hovering high above the stage. 'Not I' is about that mouth; how
it sounds and how it looks and what it makes us feel.

The
Royal Court has done a brilliant (apparently illegal) job of making
the entire auditorium pitch black. The effect is extraordinary. One
can see absolutely nothing other than Lisa Dwan's delicate red lips,
floating in mid-air. That mouth looks unbelievably small. Sometimes
it seems funny and, at other moments, it's scary as hell.

One
starts to see so much in that suspended mouth as the words – almost
an afterthought – tumble over us. With such limits imposed on this
piece – there is so little to see or hold onto – the imagination
breaks off and roams free. It's a lot like the sensation one gets
when listening to extraordinary music; the mind stays loosely
attached to the music yet also wanders off to the most unlikely
places. Staring deeply into that mouth, I saw mountains and clouds,
lakes and rivers and fields that spread out forever. I saw a whole
life and landscape nestled inside that tiny hole, on the verge of
tumbling out and burying us all.

These
images might sound far fetched but the dark does strange things to
the soul. So, too, does Dwan's extraordinarily pacey delivery. We
begin to feel incredibly disorientated as this torrent of words
whooshes right past us and out of our reach. Against all the odds, we
lurch blindly towards some sort of understanding, valiantly trying to
root ourselves in this dark and senseless vacuum.

The
tumbling words, the cold isolation of that tiny mouth and the pitch
dark pile in on top of us. It's like being trapped inside a coffin.
Lisa Dwan's jagged speech seems to mimic desperate scrabbling
fingers, clawing at dirt and instinctively trying to break free. We
root for her as we root for ourselves. It's lonely and dark but if we
could just burst through that mud and breathe in deeply one last
time, perhaps all of this might be worth something after all.